Statistical physics offers an approach to studying climate change that could dramatically reduce the time and brute-force computing that current simulation techniques require. The new approach focuses on fundamental forces that drive climate rather than on “following every little swirl” of water or air. And yes, there’s an app for that.

Because modern computers have to depict the real world with digital representations of numbers instead of physical analogues, to simulate the continuous passage of time they have to digitize time into small slices.

In 1999, the first in a series of movies came out suggesting that we are all parts of a computer simulation. The Matrix was the ultimate horror story of artificial intelligence gone wrong. But could it be true? Could we be living in a computer simulation? And how would we ever know?